Saturday, October 17, 2015

Vera Cruz (UA, 1954)

Overblown farrago

This is the story: Gary Cooper, a Confederate colonel just after the Civil War, has arrived in Mexico to avoid paying US taxes,
saves a girl in the Garden of Evil and then meets up with Charles Bronson,
who is practicing the harmonica ready for Once
Upon A Time In the West. Ernest Borgnine is there too, waiting for The
Wild Bunch to start.

Together
with Burt Lancaster, a co-producer, they decide to escort a glamorous French
countess, Denise Darcel (they actually used a French woman to play her) to Vera
Cruz. Denise is also escorted by Marquis Cesar Romero (not quite so French) and
a Prussian lancer (Henry Brandon, a Berliner). Guess what they have in the
carriage? Yep, loads of gold.

This
Technicolor farrago was directed by Robert Aldrich and is considered by some people
(French auteuristes,
mostly) to be a good film. It’s in the top fifty of the ‘Rough Guide to
Westerns’, where Paul Simpson suggests that as François Truffaut liked it, it
must be good. Mon dieu! Didn’t he know that Truffaut had a thing about inferior Westerns?
Vera Cruz helped, Simpson says, to give the Western a new lease of life. Believe that and you'll believe anything.
Anyway, it’s little more than a pot boiler.

There
are scenes at the Ruritanian court of Maximilian invaded by wild Texans that
remind you of Tom Mix saving the young
monarch in My Pal the King (1932). It’s big, colorful (rather lurid
color in fact) and boisterous. It’s fun in parts and full of gusto but it’s
essentially a poor movie, whose wooden lines (Roland Kibbee and James R Webb
from a Borden Chase story) are delivered in appropriately wooden fashion by all
the cast save Gary Cooper.

Burt misbehaves at court with disapproving martinet Henry Brandon

Coop is
splendid, of course, but hopelessly miscast. We never for one moment believe
him as a cynical mercenary changing sides and we know full well he’s never
going to steal that gold.

Gary Cooper: superb and better than the picture deserved

It was
Robert Aldrich’s first Western as director. He’d been an assistant on the John Wayne B-movie A Lady Takes a Chance in 1943
and on the 1949 version of Steinbeck’s The
Red Pony (the one with Myrna Loy and Robert Mitchum) as well as the (very) B-Western in 1951 New Mexico. But now
he was at the helm. Later he directed Lancaster again in Apache,
a very mixed bag. He made two extremely good Westerns: The
Ride Back, an almost unknown but very good 1957 movie with William
Conrad and Anthony Quinn; and, yet again with Lancaster, the superb Ulzana’s
Raid (1972), another Apache picture. He also directed the averagely-alright Kirk Douglas/Rock Hudson Western The
Last Sunset (1961). But he was capable of complete junk like the
ratpack trash 4 for Texas in 1963 and a movie that would
definitely be a candidate for the coveted title of World's Worst Western, The
Frisco Kid, a toe-curlingly bad ‘comedy’ (not) of 1979, which was, thank
goodness, Aldrich’s last.

Robert Aldrich, a curate's egg of a Western director

Vera Cruz was very violent for its day. Two Mules for Sister Sara copied its Mexican slaughter and of course The
Professionalsand The Wild Bunch took Mexican-massacring to new
heights. The credits at the end thank Mexico for its cooperation but the film
was detested there and nearly caused an international incident. People threw
seat cushions at the screen in the Mexican movie theater where it was shown.

Lancaster
calls Romero “old crocodile teeth” in the script and accuses him of over-wide
grins, which is a bit rich coming from him: he does little else but show more
teeth than a smug alligator on his way home from the orthodontist.

Old crocodile teeth

Burt was
a dynamo of energy on the set, directing camera angles, changing the script
(which Coop disliked), fussing over make-up or costumes. As an actor he did
everything possible to upstage Cooper but that was doomed of course because
Coop had made underacting an art form and with one glance makes it appear to
the audience as if Burt wasn’t even there. To be fair to Burt, he did realize:
“There I was, acting my ass off. I looked like an idiot and Cooper was
absolutely marvelous.” True, and gracious.

Gary
gets the drop on Burt and the wicked countess at the end but of course he must
play fair and let Burt go for his gun first so we get a quick-draw showdown (with
Burt, not the countess).

Coop was
famous for getting along with the female stars on any picture; in
fact many were the affairs that he had with them. But he couldn’t stand Sara
Montiel, the Spanish-Arab actor 27 years younger than he, whom he was supposed to fall for in the film.
The love scenes were very difficult because he couldn’t bear to touch her. Apparently
she never shampooed her hair, just rubbed olive oil into it.

Awkward: Coop being polite to Montiel

As a boy Coop had suffered a hip injury in an auto accident and it plagued him always. On the set of Vera Cruz he had a riding accident and injured the hip again. Together with other ailments (he suffered from stomach ulcers) it made acting difficult. Some commentators have expressed the view that the drawn faces and wry looks that were part of Coop's acting style actually had their origin in the pain and difficulty he was enduring.The
whole show has zip and rattles along but it’s overblown and over the top.
Bosley Crowther in The
New York Times called it a “big, noisy, badly-photographed hodge-podge of
outdoor melodrama,” which was a lot more perceptive and accurate than François bloomin'
Truffaut...

It’s the
kind of Western where Coop can shoot the pistol out of the hand of a pursuing
rider at full gallop with his 1880s six-gun. They have very modern Winchesters
for 1865. There’s quite an impressive part as they pass huge Aztec pyramids.
The movie was commercially successful, though – it cost $3m and grossed $9m.
Coop got $500,000 plus 10 per cent of the gross so cleared a cool $1.4m. That’d
pay for the gas in his new custom Mercedes that he had shipped out from
Stuttgart while on the set.

At center, the trio of gunmen Elam, Borgnine and Bronson

One good
thing: Jack
Elam ’s in it.A micropart,
admittedly, as a heavy, but still it’s Jack. And as I said above Ernest
Borgnine (in only his third Western), and Charles Bronson, still Buchinsky (his
very first Western) also do their bits as Elam’s fellow-thugs. Berliner Henry Brandon
(Scar from The Searchers) is well cast as a martinet captain and good old Morris Ankrum is General
Ramirez.

Bronson practicing for Once Upon a Time in the West

Vera Cruz has the air of an exotic, colorful
adventure-romance or costume drama more than a Western. Have a look at it.
Enjoy. But don’t waste your $$$ on the DVD.